Knowledge is Power -- MindTouch allows your customers to flex their knowledge muscles
Overall Satisfaction with MindTouch
MindTouch is used to create a knowledge center for our employees and for our customers (the users of our software). Content is mostly authored by technical writers in the technical publications team, but we also have SMEs in the organization who contribute. The technical publications group is responsible for reviewing content, gaining content approval, and publishing the content. The content is used by employees who sell, support, and implement our software, as well as our customers who use the software daily in their jobs. MindTouch has helped us provide more accurate and on-the-spot user assistance, which cuts down on calls to technical support. Because the content is online and provided in smaller information chunks, it is easy to keep the content current and relevant, which promotes customer satisfaction.
Pros
- Provides the ability for anyone to create custom PDFs from topics they select. This is a strength for us because we have customers who do not allow their users to get out to the Internet, so they can designate one person who can access MindTouch, and that person can create custom PDFs for the rest of the users.
- It provides the tools that allow us to customize the look and feel of the knowledge center. Because our knowledge center is just one part of our overall customer portal, we needed to be able to customize its look so that it would match the other components of the portal.
- It has flexible functionality for structuring the hierarchy of the knowledge center. This was essential for us because we wanted to be able to provide information to our users in different ways and provide more than one path to finding the information they need.
- Their technical support team is very responsive and helpful. This was important for us because this was our first time putting content online for our customers, and because we customized the look and feel ourselves, and that did require some help with HTML and CSS.
Cons
- I'd like to see MindTouch provide the ability to create your own paragraph styles more easily. Right now it's done via CSS code on the back-end, but they need a more intuitive interface like Word and RoboHelp have.
- When I delete text (especially text that has had particular styles applied to it), it should delete all the HTML/CSS code associated with that text as well. Instead, I have to go into the source and delete it manually, or it can have adverse effects on the text that follows in the topic.
- Inserting images and links in the topics/pages is cumbersome. The search/browse window that comes up has too many tabs and doesn't find the images you want to insert or the topics you want to link to very easily. It doesn't seem intuitive.
- We've only recently launched our knowledge center to our employees and customers, so it is too soon to determine hard ROI numbers. We have, however, received positive feedback and praise from customers and employees alike on how easy it is to use and how great it is to have the knowledge they need right at their fingertips.
We selected MindTouch over Parature because it didn't have the limitations of word count for topics, and because it provided the ability for users to develop custom PDF books by selecting the topics they want to include in the PDF. We selected MindTouch over Salesforce because it was less expensive and more flexible with content structure and look and feel customization.
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